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Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Minutes
Emulation
Knowledge
Trifles
Might
Advances
Great
Leisure
Make
Useful
Minute
Curiosity
Diverted
Soon
Laborious
More quotes by Samuel Johnson
Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.
Samuel Johnson
When two Eglishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.
Samuel Johnson
Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.
Samuel Johnson
Though it is evident, that not more than one age or people can deserve the censure of being more averse from learning than any other, yet at all times knowledge must have encountered impediments, and wit been mortified with contempt, or harassed with persecution.
Samuel Johnson
Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre
Samuel Johnson
An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty.
Samuel Johnson
Idleness and timidity often despair without being overcome, and forbear attempts for fear of being defeated and we may promote the invigoration of faint endeavors, by showing what has already been performed.
Samuel Johnson
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
Samuel Johnson
The vicious count their years virtuous, their acts.
Samuel Johnson
If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.
Samuel Johnson
It is wonderful what a difference learning makes upon people even in the common intercourse of life, which does not appear to be much connected with it.
Samuel Johnson
While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.
Samuel Johnson
Wine gives great pleasure, and every pleasure is of itself a good. and A man should cultivate his mind so as to have that confidence and readiness without wine, which wine gives.
Samuel Johnson
A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.
Samuel Johnson
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
Such are the vicissitudes of the world, through all its parts, that day and night, labor and rest, hurry and retirement, endear each other such are the changes that keep the mind in action: we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated we desire something else and begin a new pursuit.
Samuel Johnson
The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, were exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and virtue.
Samuel Johnson
We suffer equal pain from the pertinacious adhesion of unwelcome images, as from the evanescence of those which are pleasing and useful.
Samuel Johnson
The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue and confirmed by every look till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel and consent to yield to the general delusion.
Samuel Johnson
The care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature.
Samuel Johnson
